​​How I Made A Tiny Yet Potent Sleep Cake That Could Knock Out An Elephant

[Ed. note: the following has not been endorsed by a medical professional and should not be tried at home. Some amounts and names of ingredients have been removed or changed.]

I cradled the deep chocolate-black, peanut-butter-cup-sized cake in my open palm and gulped. This thing could potentially knock me flat on my ass right there on my kitchen floor. It could put me into a coma. Heck, it could kill me.

Now don’t get me wrong: from weed cookies to mints to gag-inducing oils and tinctures, I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of edibles before. I’ve even made my own brownies and chocolates for everything from wild parties to deep relaxation. But until this point, standing in my own kitchen, I’d never actually blended together my own special brew that contained the most relaxing drugs, herbs and mushrooms known to humankind, or at least, known to a ex-bodybuilding nutritionist hack like me.

My goal? Create a tiny yet potent sleep cake that could knock out an elephant. Or, in this case, me, after a hard day of work. And admittedly, my relentless self-experimenting mind was curious to see what would happen when opioid-like painkillers, medicinal mushrooms, cannabis and essential oils get whisked together for four solid hours in a commercial immersion blender on my kitchen counter, then wind up getting pumped into my capillaries.

I licked my lips, brought the cake up to my mouth and prepared take my first courageous nibble. Then I hesitated. What if all the ingredients I’d put into this thing somehow combined to create an alchemy of certain death that would cause me to bleed out like an Ebola-crazed chimpanzee?

Screw it. I’m willing to take a chance if it means I’ve created a tiny sleep cake that could shut off my brain and give me sweet, lucid, please-God-don’t-let-the-house-catch-on-fire dreams.

Let’s investigate the ingredients of this tiny relaxation bomb that I had begun to cook up nearly 24 hours earlier, shall we?

For the “base” of my sleep cake, I chose the healthiest lipids I know of, or at least, fats that biohackers worldwide are blending in copious amounts into their coffee every morning, which must make them safe (aside from anal leakage, I’ve never heard of anyone actually dying from fatty coffee): coconut oil and goat ghee.

Then, for the first actual medicinal component of my sleep cake, I chose the obvious primary ingredient: cannabis. I had a bottle of CBD capsules in my pantry—40 capsules, to be exact. Cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is the more relaxing and less paranoia-inducing component of hemp. I gently twisted and broke open each capsule, then lovingly emptied them one-by-one, along with the coconut oil and ghee, into my mixing tool of a choice: a cheesy yet formidable home-friendly commercial immersion blender known on the internets as a “Magic Butter” machine, described on the manufacturer’s website as “the world’s first countertop botanical extractor scientifically designed for a specific purpose: creating incredible recipes and botanical infusions with little or no labor.”

Mission accomplished. But everybody knows CBD all by itself is no fun. So I headed down the street to my local, friendly Washington state legal dispensary to hunt down just a smidge of marijuana. Not just any old marijuana, mind you: I wanted an indica strain that could tranquilize a rhinoceros.

I scanned the glass cases at the dispensary, reading the intense descriptions next to each tiny jar of bud:

Strawberry-Banana: this powerful bud can encourage a deep relaxation and jolly mental high

Purple Kush: a few tastes of Purple Kush can leave you feeling stuck to the couch with drooping eyelids.

Death Star: most can expect to feel drowsy, relaxed, and maybe even a little unmotivated after several tastes of this psychoactive plant.

Ice Wreck: drowsy and relaxed, this strain is known to promote a tingly body buzz and a bad case of the munchies.

MK Ultra: named after a mind-control program operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), MK Ultra is an uber-strong indica hybrid that promotes a dreamy, euphoric state.

Hmm…if it’s good enough for the CIA, it’s good enough for me. I grabbed some MK Ultra, forked over my ID and cash, and headed home with my paper bag full of mind control. Forty minutes later, I’d successfully ground it, “decarboxylated” it in the oven, and sprinkled it over the CBD, coconut oil and ghee. Based on my rough calculations, this would give me a good mix of THC and CBD per sleep cake. But I’ve never been too good at math.

Stuff was already smelling funky. I glanced at my watch. That evening, in eight hours, my wife would be home from a weekend getaway with my nine-year-old twin boys, and I still had to add the extra ingredients, blend, pour into molding and chill my precious little experimental sleep cakes. I sped up.

Next: reishi spores. Why reishi? This medicinal mushroom belongs to a special class of medicines known as “tonic herbs”, which means it can lower cortisol, reduce stress, relax the body, and apparently even by used by ancient Chinese emperors for immortality. Screw immortality. I just wanted to sleep at the end of a stressful day. I added a whole heap of reishi spores.

I then moved on to a substance the federal government is currently trying to classify as a Class-1 Controlled Substance, but that, at this point, you can buy anywhere on the Internet or at your local friendly smoke shop: kratom.

Kratom is an opioid-like, euphoria inducing painkiller that in recent years has gained popularity worldwide as a recreational drug for its narcotic-like effects, but traditionally, was only used in Thailand, and in some parts of Malaysia. My research on Kratom turned up the following:

“Kratom contains a number of active components, so-called alkaloids, of which mitragynine is believed to be responsible for most of its effects. Mitragynine is an opioid agonist, meaning that it has an affinity for the opioid receptors in your brain. These receptors influence one’s mood and anxiety. Mitragynine binds to these receptors, improves your mood and gives a euphoric-like feeling, just like opiates such as heroin and opium. The big difference between kratom and opiates is that mitragynine prefers so-called delta opioid receptors, while opiates bind to mu opioid receptors. At higher doses, mitragynine increasingly stimulates mu receptors. This is believed to be the reason that kratom has a stimulating effect at lower doses and narcotic effects at higher doses, and that it is not (strongly) addictive.”

I eyeballed about a full eighth-cup of the stuff, dumped it in on top of the CBD, THC, reishi spores, coconut oil and ghee, and made a mental note to research whether overstimulating my delta opoid receptor would require me to purchase a new liver at some point in the future. But sleep science must progress forward, thus so did I.

After the Kratom came my chemical-hacking attempts to make my mixture as absorbable as possible. I was already familiar with the idea that black pepper combined with turmeric could increase the absorption of just about anything you combine it with, from kale salad polyphenols to sardine omega-3 fatty acids and beyond.

Apparently, something called “bioperine” in black pepper and “curcuminoids” in turmeric act as adjuvants, which basically means they enhance your body’s ability to absorb and utilize other chemical compounds they’re consumed with.

Black pepper? Check.

Enough turmeric to spice up an entire industrial-sized vat of curry? Check.

Finally, for even more absorptivity-magic, I added a few drops of a very expensive bottle a naturopathic physician bestowed upon me a year prior: copaiba oil. Supposedly, copaiba oil is a terpene – also known as a volatile aromatic molecule – that produces an “entourage effect” when combined with cannabis. More or less, this means that when mixed with weed, copaiba oil makes the weed even more potent. Why not, right?

Lastly, for the flavor-enhancing icing on the cake to ensure this batch didn’t wind up tasting like the foul dung of Godzilla mixed with a Chernobyl rock? A few pinches of sea salt, half a bottle of dark chocolate stevia, and a cup of dark cacao powder. Boom. Done. I pushed go on my Magical Butter machine and then walked away. Four hours to go-time, baby.

When I unscrewed the lid of the machine, the aroma was overpowering. My wife would likely not be pleased that our entire home now smelled like a mix between a medical marijuana facility, an Indian restaurant, a Thai whore-house and the Ghirardelli chocolate factory.

I threw on the fan switch, flung open the kitchen door and windows, and went back to the machine. Slowly. Don’t spill. I very carefully began to pour the brew from the machine into my refrigerator molds so that I could chill and harden my precious cakes. As I poured, I made a mental calculation: each cake contained approximately $18 of ingredients. It was worth eating rice and beans for a month if I could invent the world’s new substitute for Valium.

Mold-pouring of 30 sleep cakes complete, I shoved the batch into the refrigerator. I figured it would take two hours for my babies to harden and become little chocolat-ey bombs of beauty sleep goodness.

And now here I stood, preparing to eat my first cake.

I took a bite. It tasted…marvelous. An herbal, curry-like, deep, dark, salty chocolate marvelous.

I took another bite. Licked my fingers. A third and final bite. Then I meandered up to the bedroom, opened a book, and waited.

I don’t actually remember falling asleep.

I also don’t remember my wife coming home.

But I do remember lucid dreams. Fairies. Hot ones. Unicorns, prancing in bikinis. Me, flying like Peter Pan in green leotards, a pirate dagger clutched in my teeth. And very, very large sleeping elephants, slumbering in the African savannah, knocked over hard on their asses with all four legs stuck up in the air and their tongues hanging out their mouths like a dead horse. And I woke up refreshed, relaxed, and alert, with a big chocolate-stained smile on my face.

Take that, Ambien. Take that all you other nasty little pharmaceutical pills that never ever gave me a refreshing night of sleep that double as my own cranial Game Of Thrones episode. The sleep cakes worked. They freaking worked. So over the next two months, I ate most of them. I shared a few with insomniac friends, who begged me for more. I dipped them in nut butter and downed them with a glass of red wine. I even gave one to the owner of a marijuana edibles company in the hopes he’d buy the recipe from me and make me famous as the inventor of Ben Greenfield’s Mighty-Mighty Sleep Cakes: Be Dead To The World Forever.

Would I make a batch of these bad boys again? You betcha. Would I eat two? Quite possibly. And when I eventually die, and they take out my kratom-weed-reishi streaked liver, at least I know I’ll have died a well-slept man.

Ben Greenfield is a strength and conditioning coach, exercise physiologist, and the author of Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health and Life. He blogs about fitness, nutrition, and wellness at bengreenfieldfitness.com.

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